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Always enjoy visits to see family and friends. So when work allows me time to do so,
it adds fun to the week to do so.

We were all chatting about our dreams careers and how we got there.

Enjoy !

We all agreed a dream job requires basically 3 steps.

First: It must be a good fit for your abilities.

Second: Match your goals for yourself,as well as where you want to go in Life.

Third: It should make you happy.

Finding a career with all three of those ingredients isn’t easy, but with the right strategies you can uncover a vocation that will bring you satisfaction. Below are seven ways you can match your talents and ambitions to your dream career.

Take an Aptitude Test
An aptitude test is the most obvious path to discovering your dream career. It can be an effective option, too, if you choose the right one. The Clifton Strengths Finder is a well-regarded personal assessment test that’s been taken by thousands of people. It theorizes that everyone possesses a certain number of fixed, universal personal-character attributes that together result in a tendency to develop certain skills more easily and succeed in certain fields while being less successful in others. The test is 80 questions long, takes roughly 20-30 minutes to complete, and reveals the test-taker’s top five “talent themes.” With those in hand, you can search for work where you can best make use of those strengths.

Ask .. The Right Questions
A key component to finding answers is knowing which questions to ask. Forbes posted a fill-in-the-blank assessment that breaks down the big question (“What’s my dream career?”) into nine simpler ones. Your responses to those will reveal patterns and help show you what you really want to be doing with your life.

Make those Lists
List-making is one of the tried-and-true ways of reaching a decision. During your search for a dream career, try creating three lists: what you’re talented at, what makes you happy, and what your goals are. The lengthier the lists are, the better; jot down whatever comes to mind. After you’re done, look for correlations between the lists. What falls into all three categories? What activities fulfill all of the necessary requirements of your dream career?

Ask Others’ .. Opinions
Sometimes you don’t have the best perspective on your own life. Friends and family often understand aspects of you better than you understand yourself. Ask people close to you what activities they think that you excel at and are happiest doing. Their answers could propel you onto a completely different career trajectory than you expected.

Do some Information gathering Interviews
Once you’ve got an idea of what you’d like to be doing for a living, learn from someone who’s already in your dream field. Arrange an informational interview with someone who has the career you think you want, and find out the realities of his or her industry. Figure out if the job is really something that you’re interested in, and if your skills match up with the duties it entails.

Get Some Experience
After you find the career you think will fulfill you, try it out for a while. Look for opportunities to job shadow, intern, or volunteer in your profession of choice. It will give you a chance to immerse yourself in that work environment and find out if it’s somewhere you’ll be comfortable. You probably won’t get paid for it at first, but that’s one of the costs of looking for a job you love, which leads to my next point.

Think Long Term not short term
Don’t just think about what will make you happy right now. Consider what lifestyle you’ll be comfortable with in the future. A lot of dream jobs don’t pay well, so ask yourself if you’re willing to give up some of life’s luxuries so you can be happy to go to work everyday. Make sure that you know what you’re sacrificing if you leave your current occupation to pursue a less predictable career path.

Most important of all was we agreed on you have to Want It !!
It takes some work, but the rewards will be ever so sweet.

This post is unedited and is Brian’s original post….hope it helps you too !

How to Find Your True Calling

By Brian Tracy

Your success in life will be largely determined by your ability to find your true calling, the right work for you to do, and then putting your whole heart into doing it very well.

The happiest people are those who have carefully thought through who they are, what they want, where they are going, and then decided exactly what they need to do to get to their goal. Asking yourself five targeted questions can help you home in on whatever path is right for you.

#1: What do I do easily and well?

When you are seeking your true calling, you must look at the activities that have always been easy for you but which have been difficult for others. Often, you will get comments and compliments on how well you do a particular task. You will be surprised when you hear those remarks, because you never even thought about it that much. It just seemed natural for you from the very beginning.

My daughter is a natural and spontaneous little actress. From the time she was three or four years old, she has memorized lines and acted in every school play and function that has ever come up. In fact, by the time she was six, she was memorizing every line in the school play, not only her own but the lines of every other child. When the other children forgot their lines, Christina would whisper them and keep the play on track.

When Christina was 11 years old, she appeared at a city council meeting and gave a speech in favor of a permit allowing her school to expand. She stood up at the meeting, on a chair, in front of 150 adults, and gave an impassioned little talk. As a result, the permit was granted – and Christina was on the front page of two newspapers the following day.

#2: What are the things that I have done in life that have been most responsible for my success?

In looking back over your work and your activities, what are the things you have done that have given you the greatest rewards and satisfaction? If you work for a company, what are the activities you have engaged in that have achieved the very best results for yourself and your company? Your previous success experiences are signposts pointing to the sort of things that you should be doing more and more of if you want to deploy yourself more fully for greater happiness and satisfaction in life.

#3: What would I do differently, knowing what I know now?

Is there anything that you are currently doing that you wouldn’t start up again if you had to do it over? Is there any relationship that you are in that you wouldn’t get into if you could make the choice today? Is there any job or part of any job that you are doing that you would not embark upon, knowing what you now know, if you had to do it over?

As many as 95 percent of people working today are under-employed, not working to their full capacity for themselves and their companies. Only 5 percent, when interviewed, will say that they are working fully extended at their current job. Only 5 percent feel that their entire potential is being consumed and that they are working on the outer edge of their abilities. These people also tend to be the happiest, the highest paid, and the most fulfilled in any organization or enterprise.

#4: What work would I choose to do if I won a million dollars, cash, in the lottery tomorrow?

This is a question I sometimes ask my seminar audiences. When you hear this question, your gut reaction is a good indicator of where you are today and possibly where you should be going in the future. Most people, when they think of winning a million dollars, think of quitting their current job and doing something else. There is nothing wrong with that. Since most people have backed into their current jobs, taking them because they just happened to be there at the time a job was needed, most people probably should be doing something else.

Napoleon Hill once said the key to success in America is to find out what you really enjoy doing, and then find a way to make a good living at it. What do you most love to do?

Successful people don’t feel like they work at all. They are doing what they love to do, and they are so busy doing it that their work becomes their play. Their work life and their personal life blends together like a hand fitting neatly into a glove. There is no separation. They are totally committed individuals who are accomplishing far more in a shorter period of time than the average person who is merely going through the motions.

#5: If I were absolutely guaranteed tremendous success in any job I chose, what field would I go into?

One of the major reasons people hold themselves back from doing what they are truly meant to do is that they are afraid they will fail in some way. And being afraid that you will fail is the surest guarantor that you will fail.

But what if you are absolutely guaranteed success in any field you choose? What would it be? What would you want to do if you had unlimited time, unlimited resources, and guaranteed success?

The answer to that question should cause you to tingle a little bit. It should make your stomach flutter. It should send a thrill of excitement and anticipation through you that tells you this is the job you should be doing.

Asking and answering the above five questions can change your life.

You have within you talents and abilities so vast that you could never use them all if you lived to be a thousand. You have natural skills and talents that can enable you to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you could ever set for yourself. There are no limits on what you can be, have, or do if you find your true calling.

When you become one of the few people who are doing what they love to do, who are totally absorbed in doing something they really care about, you will make more progress in a couple of years than the average wage slave makes in five or 10 years. You will come to the attention of people who can help you and open doors for you. You will be happy and fulfilled in both your work and your personal relationships. You will have more energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. You will unlock your true potential, and your future will become unlimited.

[Ed. Note. Brian Tracy has accumulated over four decades of studying the success habits of successful people. He has then taken these practices to train groups, both individual and large corporations what is necessary to make personal success simple. He has offered his guidance as one of the ETR Transformation Contest experts, find out about Brian Tracy and his expertise here.]